Concept image for one of my covers

I think I shared a rough image a while ago of the rough layout I wanted for Caszandra.  Today I found the image I drew when commissioning Stray.  I sure placed a lot of importance on the backpack!  When I was a kid all backpacks were heavily annotated in this fashion...

Inn - Chap 3

What is it with me and abandoned white stone buildings?

Inn Chap 2

In this installment of this abandoned project, we see that SGM was not the first time I've balanced an experienced and competent POV with a younger and untried one.

Vanagar is very different from Kendall. I quite like the character arc I had planned for her.  In fact, since I stopped writing after she made the major progression on that arc, I suspect that the transition was what I wanted to write, and since it happens relatively early in the story, is why this is unfinished.

An abandoned project - Inn Chap 1

I was just re-reading Sabriel, which I'm fairly sure was the inspiration of an old partial of mine with the working title of Inn.  Then I started re-reading the old partial, instead of, y'know, working on things I intend to finish.

So I figure I shall spread the time-wasting around and give you the first few chapters of Inn over a couple of posts.  There's a lot wrong with this story - it reads rather D&D-ish to me now, but I'm entirely amused by the situation.  Don't read on if you like things like resolution, or endings...

[Caution: I am unkind to horses in this chapter.  Reminiscent of a scene in Champion.]

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An award for Forfeit

Award recognition is one of those complicated things for writers.  Is there such a thing as 'best'?  Judges bring their own individual taste.  Popular awards rely very much of a piece/author being known to the voting pool.  It's all very complicated, so I've tried to adopt the attitude of appreciating any compliments coming my way without getting too hung up on missing out.

But I'm still going to enjoy adding to my display cabinet an Aurealis Award for "Forfeit" as the Best Fantasy Novella 2016.

HUGE thanks to Judith Tarr for prodding me into tightening up the story.  And thanks again to my readers.  You're the ones that really make my day.

You can watch the ceremony here if you're so inclined.

Self-pub Statistics 2017

Here's the latest round of statistics, for those who are interested in such things.  I'm being lazy and just using a tool called Book Report to automatically turn all my Amazon sales into nice graphs.  Amazon is still about 85% of my sales, so this gives you a good idea of how it all breaks down for a laid-back non-promo type like me.  [I'd far rather just write and publish than go through promo hoops, which does mean my sales slide between releases.]

[If you want to see just how successful hard work and a solid promo plan (along with good books) can be, check out some of the posts Patty Jansen does on her far more active writing career.]

Earnings per month

First, here's earnings from when I first put my books up on Amazon (a few months after I'd first published them on Smashwords).  The two big peaks are two Bookbub promotions, back when it was easier to get into Bookbub.  The initial early leaps were in the days when putting a book free would have a tangible impact on your sales.  [The third biggest peak, incidentally, is the release of In Arcadia.]

Earnings by book and store

The Touchstone Trilogy is by leaps and bounds my bestseller, as can be seen by the pie chart.  No prizes for guessing which books are represented by the right of the chart.

Numbers and dollars by book

Dividing this by seven years makes the amounts seem much less impressive - but still definitely nothing to sniff at!  Not anything I could gamble on early retirement with, but a solid supplement to my income.  [Publishing and Amazon algorithms are such variable things that I don't think I would ever bank on book royalties until I no longer had things like mortgages to worry about.]

For the future...well, I'd still rather just write and publish and see what happens - the beauty of self-publishing is that the books are mine, and they're not going away, and I'm comfortable with letting my mailing list grow slowly and organically.

Not that I'd object to wild success.  I recently had a rather heart-stopping query from a very major production company about the film/TV rights for Touchstone.  It came to nothing, sadly, but it sure did give me some fun daydreams.  I re-read the trilogy afterwards, and really don't see how it could be adapted without cutting down on the massive cast list - but I thought it would be fun to have a show that paralleled Zan and Cass.  They both technically 'graduate' around the same time and are such different people.

In Arcadia magnet winners

Whoo!  The random number generator has spat out the following names for their own fancy magnet
:

- Jen (entered on Goodreads)
- AtillatheMom (entered on blog)
- G  (entered on blog)
- Eun dong Park  (entered on blog)
- TheSFReader  (entered on blog)
- Meredith  (entered on blog)
- katayoun  (entered on blog)
- Lexie  (entered on blog)

Congratulations!  To claim your magnet, email me at mail at andreakhost.com with the address you want the magnet sent to, and the quote (from In Arcadia, or anywhere else in the Touchstone trilogy) you would like me to write in shiny gold pen across the magnet (you can also optionally include my signature, your name, bad drawings, other things - let me know what you'd like!)  It's a big magnet!  [But my handwriting is neither small nor neat.]

Magnets not claimed by April will be redrawn.